Sunderworld, Volume I, page 25
Leopold regarded the bewilderlite uncertainly, nodded at Isabel, then jogged toward the adults. He was halfway there when Richter turned to shout something over his shoulder.
Over the rise behind him, a pair of uniformed LAPD officers appeared.
Leopold came to a sudden halt and swore under his breath.
Richter hadn’t only been in contact with the Worthingtons—he’d brought a couple of cops with him. Classic, asshole Richter. Of course his dad would turn this into a Teachable Moment. Richter had probably made a deal with the police to keep Leopold in a holding cell overnight, just to scare him.
The only option now was to backtrack and bolt, though he’d wanted to reassure Mrs. Worthington that Emmet was going to be okay. It seemed he wouldn’t get the chance.
“Leopold!”
He spun around at the terrified pitch of Isabel’s voice.
She was waving at him frantically. “RUN!”
Sixty-One
Leopold ran like hell, slowing just long enough to turn Emmet in the right direction. With Isabel grabbing one of Emmet’s arms and Leopold the other, they broke into a mad dash. In his semi-dazed state, Emmet was pliable enough.
They’d had no choice but to abandon Emmet’s equipment in a heap by Johnny Ramone’s grave. At their backs was a chorus of shouts, Richter’s loudest of all, while Emmet registered a steady litany of complaints re: the status of those snacks from his mom, the unfinished bag of Astroburger, and the wisdom of leaving his gear unattended in a graveyard. Leopold knew it would’ve been simpler to bewilder the adults with Norm’s device, but his conscience was too heavy. He’d be lucky if he could get Emmet’s head right again; if he used untested magic on Emmet’s mom and messed up her brain, too, he’d never forgive himself.
Distantly, Leopold heard one of the officers swear, then grumble about being forced to run.
“This was supposed to be my day off,” groaned the other one.
Leopold exchanged a look with Isabel. Clearly, Richter had recruited a pair of bargain-bin cops for the job.
Running three across was slow, but Leopold knew Hollywood Forever well enough to make a few clever, sudden turns that kept them ahead and mostly out of sight of their pursuers—all while answering Emmet’s increasingly agitated questions with Trust me, trust me, I know this is crazy, but please trust me.
Finally, after rounding a blind of trees and surprising a goth couple making out on Boris Karloff’s grave, Emmet whispered, “Okay, I do, okay, I trust you,” in this sad, scared way, like he knew something big was wrong, and wrong with him, too—a moment of clarity that, combined with Emmet’s worsening nosebleed, made Leopold feel like dying.
After that, they didn’t need to coax Emmet along anymore. He was athletic and ran cross-country. Suddenly they were having trouble keeping up with him.
“Is his nose still bleeding?” Isabel asked, her words punctuated by chugging breaths.
“Yeah,” Leopold said, lungs burning as he guided them through a weedy patch. They darted into a passage that squeezed between a long, white mausoleum and a high wall, past a section with the graves all in Cyrillic, then through a clique of strutting peacocks that honked in haughty annoyance. Despite their efforts to stay ahead, Richter and Dr. Worthington’s shouts hounded them stubbornly. More distantly, and much more occasionally, one of the cops would blurt out a half-hearted Stop, kids!
So far, the teenagers had done a fair job of keeping out of the adults’ line of sight, but it seemed there would be no evading them completely. Now, shouldering through a prickly boxwood hedge, Leopold faced a series of bad options. Hard to their left were a smattering of graves and a few big tombs in the shadow of the adjoining Paramount wall, which was unscalably high and topped with razor wire. To their right was a wide-open lawn where they’d quickly be spotted.
Far ahead was yet another unbreachable wall, but this one, at least, had an exit gate, beyond which lay Gower Street and the promise of escape.
That would have been the obvious choice, except the adults seemed to have reached this same conclusion.
Richter and Dr. Worthington appeared ahead of them now, crossing the broad stretch of lawn and, in the process, cutting off their only path to the gate. The two uninvested cops were still somewhere behind them. The adults were closing in from both sides.
“Over here!” Emmet cried, beelining for a row of fancy crypts.
“Emmet, wait—”
They dove after him, ducking behind a glassy tomb that looked like something out of Architectural Digest: Eternity Edition, while Emmet darted over to its next-door neighbor: a miniature Greek temple ringed by black columns and mildew-stained statuary. When they caught up with him, he was gazing through the bars of its heavy door. Inside, Leopold glimpsed a cramped stone room that held graves stacked like drawers in a file cabinet.
“Nice digs,” Emmet said, his eyes wide with interest. “We should hide in here.”
“Bad idea,” Leopold said urgently. “Even if we managed to get the door open, all they’d have to do is look through the bars and they’d see us.”
“No, they won’t—this one’s veiled,” said Isabel, studying Emmet with mild amazement. Emmet was busy gathering a bouquet of dandelions from the overgrowth. “There’s an enchantment on it.”
“What kind of enchantment?” Leopold asked, throwing a look behind him. No sign yet that they’d been spotted.
“I don’t know.” Isabel reached up to run her hand over some runic inscriptions beside a carved winged skull. “I think this says it wants some kind of payment.”
“Payment? Like, money?”
“I don’t know,” she said again, shaking her head. “I dropped out of the Lyceum a few months ago, never finished my Sunderunes seminar—”
“What?” Leopold turned, stunned, to stare at her. “Why would you drop out of the Lyceum?”
She almost laughed. “Why are you so upset?”
Emmet shoved between them, then pushed his freshly plucked dandelion bouquet through the bars. The flowers fell, without fanfare, onto the dusty interior floor. After a moment, the door returned a heavy clunk, groaning as some interior latch released.
Leopold and Isabel stilled, then turned in unison to study Emmet in fresh astonishment.
“How did you know to do that?” Leopold asked.
Emmet shrugged. “Everyone likes flowers.”
Isabel, meanwhile, was struggling with the door. “Help, please!”
Leopold moved quickly, shouldering it open with a hard shove. Stone grinding on stone, the giant door swung inward. They stumbled into a cold, stale-smelling room.
Together, Leopold and Isabel pushed the door closed.
From outside, the crypt had looked no bigger than a garden shed. Inside, it was easily three times larger. The walls were a checkerboard of grave markers, all washed in pale yellow light filtered through a stained-glass ceiling. Occupying the middle of the floor was a dark marble obelisk, taller than Leopold and covered in Sunderunes and hieroglyphic pictographs.
It was all weirdly beautiful.
“Mister Berry,” said Emmet, looking around in wonder. “There’s something super wrong with me, isn’t there?”
Leopold clasped his shoulder. “Nothing we can’t fix, Mister Worthington.”
Emmet nodded. His eyes, dull but darting, came to rest on the nearest grave slab. “Cool.”
“Larry!”
“Emmet!”
The sudden shouts of their parents made everyone jump. They couldn’t have been far from the crypt’s door. Emmet spun toward the voices, about to shout back, but Leopold shook his head seriously—not yet—and Emmet looked confused, then sobered, then scared.
“We can’t stay long,” Leopold whispered to Isabel. “His mind keeps weaving in and out. It’s making him unpredictable.”
Isabel nodded grimly, and they led Emmet away from the door toward the black obelisk in the center of the floor. Emmet rested his back against the pillar and struggled to wipe blood from his chin.
“Oh, you’re smearing it,” Isabel said, digging a handkerchief from her seemingly bottomless cloak. “Let me help—”
Watching as she dabbed carefully at Emmet’s face, Leopold felt something stir within him. He hardly knew Isabel and yet here she was, helping him—looking out for him and for Emmet, too—with a sincerity that was so rare in his experience he could hardly define it.
He’d make it up to her somehow.
Afterward, Emmet looked better, if still worryingly distant. Isabel, too, was flagging: Her cheeks had drained of color, and her hand was at her side again. She’d been hiding it well, but it was clear now she hadn’t fully recovered from her earlier cast. She needed rest—and probably more of Norm’s cooking. The Aether snacks they’d bought from the convenience store, he realized with dismay, had been left behind in the subway car.
Leopold urged Isabel to sit, then crouched beside her, at the ready in case Emmet decided to bolt for the door. For now, Emmet stood puzzling at the obelisk, passing his hand over its arcane inscriptions.
Isabel, meanwhile, had removed the black vial from its holster clasp again. She was sipping at it, wincing as the dark liquid passed her lips. Leopold noticed it was nearly empty.
“What can I do?” he asked. “Do you need to lie down?”
She shook her head. “I just need a little time. I’ll be all right.”
She let her head fall back against the stone while the solution did its work. He peered at the vial in her hand. The etched glass read Ghost Ship Enceladus. Foremast. Pine.
For reasons he couldn’t explain, he committed the words to memory.
There were more shouts from outside, distant now, then static from a faraway police radio. The adults seemed to be losing their trail. When Leopold’s eyes returned to Isabel, she was staring at him with somber urgency.
“Leopold,” she said, quiet and intense.
“Yeah?”
“There’s something I need to tell you. I wasn’t sure I was going to. I mean, it’s pretty serious, and we only just met.” They shared a look, in it a charged and mutual acknowledgment: It didn’t feel like they’d just met. “But if anything happens to me,” she continued, “there’s something I need you to know.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to you,” he said sharply, his reaction so visceral it surprised him. “I told you—you can count on me. I’ve got your back.”
She shook her head, smiling a little. “Like I said, I appreciate that. But we could get separated. Or one of us could get arrested. Or”—her eyes darted away briefly—“you never know. And then you’ll have to figure things out on your own.” She was looking at his shirt now, at the circular shape outlined beneath it.
“Isabel—”
“Richard and Maria Alvarez.” She took a breath, almost trembling with the effort it had required to summon those words. “Those were my parents’ names.”
Leopold went still.
“They were alchemists,” she said. “And scientists. And before they died, I think—I’m almost certain—they had something to do with creating that object on your chest.”
He blinked, a chilling theory crystallizing in his mind. “The lab accident that killed them. You think it had something to do with this?” His hand rose to touch it, the movement unconscious.
She nodded.
“Isabel,” he said quietly. “If that’s true, I think there’s a chance your parents might’ve known my mom.”
She straightened then, her eyes sparking back to life. “What do you mean?”
“The Guide.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “It belonged to my mother. She wanted me to find—”
And then the crypt filled with a sharp, echoing sound that took them both by surprise, because in that moment it was the last thing either of them expected to hear:
Emmet was laughing.
Sixty-Two
Isabel and Leopold leapt to their feet and scrambled around the obelisk. Emmet was pointing at something on the pillar and laughing his ass off, the sound so loud it reverberated off the walls.
“Emmet—you have to lower your voice—”
“Please, we need to be quiet—”
“Look at it,” he was saying, still cackling. He nodded at the runic inscription. “It looks like a penis!”
Isabel cringed.
“He thinks he’s fourteen,” said Leopold by way of apology, then led Emmet away by the arm. “All right, Mister Worthington. Let’s play the quiet game.”
“The quiet game is for babies!”
“Hey!” Someone was banging at the door. “Who’s in there?”
Leopold tensed. Shit. It was one of the cops.
“Just us!” Emmet called back. Leopold tried too late to clap a hand over his mouth, but Emmet shoved him away. “We’re in here!”
Isabel shot Leopold a worried glance.
Emmet got that faraway look in his eyes again and turned back to gaze at the obelisk.
“Open the door, guys.” The other cop now. “This isn’t a game.” They both sounded more irritated than angry, but the jig was up either way: There would be no hiding from them now.
“Leopold,” Isabel whispered. “Do you still have the bewilderlite?”
“Yeah,” he said, patting himself down. “It was right…” He searched one pants pocket, then the other, but came up empty.
Her voice hollow, Isabel said, “You lost it?”
Leopold was shaking his head, searching the floor in a panic. “I swear I had it. I don’t know what happened. It must’ve fallen out of my pocket while we were running—”
“I’ve got it,” said Emmet, looking dazed but triumphant. He held up the bewilderlite, fumbling it between his fingers as if it were a toy. “I snatched it from Larry earlier.”
“What? Emmet, give that back—”
“No way,” he said, souring. “You two get all the cool props. She has a whole tool belt full of them. You can take the limiknife. I want this one.”
“You can’t use a limiknife in here,” Isabel said, as if this should’ve been obvious. “Too many protective enchantments—too dangerous—”
“Too dangerous,” Emmet mocked in a whiny voice. He tucked the bewilderlite in his pocket. “Whatever, Mom.”
“Larry!” Richter bellowed. “Get out here before I ship you off to military school!”
The pounding at the door had only grown louder. Leopold’s dad was his usual belligerent self. Emmet’s mom, on the other hand, sounded like she was barely keeping it together.
“Emmet, baby, please—there’s no need to keep running—no one’s going to hurt you—”
But the tremor in her voice said she wasn’t so sure. Between bangs on the door, Leopold could hear Dr. Worthington assuring the cops that neither her son nor Larry were any threat, but then he heard the cops bandying about the words breaking and entering, and suddenly Leopold was wondering whether busting into a private crypt was some kind of felony.
His anxiety kicked into high gear.
Then he heard Emmet say, “Oh, hello,” in this bemused sort of way, gathering up the fallen bouquet of dandelions before stalking toward the rear wall.
Leopold, concerned, started after him. “Emmet, wait, what are you—”
Without hesitating, Emmet arranged the limp bunch in a marble vase—a permanent fixture for displaying flowers—then grasped the base with both hands and twisted it forty-five degrees to the right.
A loud clank of gears issued from deep inside the stone wall, the sound such a shock it stopped Leopold in his tracks. A grave slab slid away to reveal a dark cavity the size of a small door.
Leopold and Isabel gaped at it.
“A secret passage in a wizard’s tomb,” Emmet whispered, quoting a line from the Sunderworld theme. “Cool Thursday.”
“How did you do that?” Isabel asked him.
“I read the instructions.” Emmet pointed behind him at the obelisk and its indecipherable carvings.
Isabel turned to look at them—then, with renewed fascination, at Emmet. “You can read Sunderunes? I can only make out half of it.”
Emmet wasn’t listening. “Holy Swedish meatballs,” he breathed. He bent down, peering into the dark of the door he’d opened. “Is that what I think it is?”
Leopold crouched, Isabel scrambling to join them. Deep within the gloom was a large, cube-shaped appliance covered in flaking white paint, a round door built into the front.
“It’s a tumbleport,” said Leopold, his voice tinged with awe.
“Totally,” said Emmet. “But some prehistoric model. Not like the one Max uses.”
Nodding in agreement, Isabel asked, “Who’s Max?”
“No one worth discussing,” Leopold said flatly, then pulled open the tumbleport door. It produced a loud shriek and a flurry of rust from its hinge. He made a face as a musty stench wafted out at them.
“Oh my God, can we use it?” Emmet cried.
“Hell no.” Isabel was already backing away, head shaking. “Rich people used to put these in family tombs—to make visiting the dead more convenient, I guess—but this one’s gotta be eighty years old. It’s almost definitely broken, and even if it’s not, we have no idea where it—”
“Don’t make us break down this door!” Richter bellowed from outside.
“Emmet!” Leopold cried. “No!”
Leopold, who’d looked away for only a moment, had turned back in time to catch a glimpse of his friend’s feet disappearing into what looked like a void filled with stars.
Emmet had leapt into the open tumbleport.
There was no time to react: The door had already slammed shut, the machine thrumming loudly as it worked. There was a crescendo of sound and a strobing red light that flashed from a dozen cracks in its rusting body. Leopold could’ve sworn he heard the receding cry of Emmet going wheeeee!—and then the machine fell silent.
